I am currently the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, I was a Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and a Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. I am a proud native of Chicago, Illinois, and I'm an even prouder graduate of the following schools: St. Ignatius College Prep, the University of Missouri-Columbia (B.A. Journalism/Religious Studies), and Brown University (A.M. and Ph.D., American Civilization). I have been honored to be named a Harry S. Truman Scholar (2000), Sue Shear Institute for Women in Public Life Amethyst Award recipient (2009), German Marshall Fund of the U.S. American Fellow (2011), Ford Foundation Diversity Fellow (2012), French American Foundation Young Leader (2015), and National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellow (2017-2018). My teaching has been recognized with Georgetown University's Dorothy M. Brown Teaching Award (2014), the Edward Bunn, S.J. Award for Faculty Excellence (2015), and the College Academic Council's Faculty Award (2016). In 2016, the Chronicle of Higher Education named me a Top Influencer in Higher Education in recognition of my curation of #FergusonSyllabus, a response to the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. I’m a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow.
My book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won several awards including a 2022 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Writing, 2021 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2019-2021 Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award from Harvard’s Business History Review, the 2021 Hagley Prize in Business History, the 2021 Organization of American Historians Lawrence W. Levine Award, the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, and the 2020 Hooks National Book Award.